In his introduction, O’Brien says: “I’m hip. . . . Hipness is a pre-existing condition, something you discover in yourself by yourself. . . . To be hip is to belong to an underground, a subculture or counterculture, an elective tribe . . . detached from the main thing and proud of its detachment. Hip is not always an option, but it is always optional. . . . The original hipster was an underground figure.” All of these pronouncements are offered with little critical distance. “How do I know?” O’Brien says. “I don’t know, I just know.” His roster is substantial, but also reflective of its moment: Men outnumber women here by about five to one. A short list of authors includes Miles Davis, Henry Miller, Neal Cassady, Anatole Broyard, Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson. Despite the impressive names, O’Brien’s oft-employed daddy-o tone leaves the reader wondering about the seriousness of the project. Introducing Carl Solomon, O’Brien says, “Some hip cats were so fractured by intellect, temperament and experience that they could never fit into straight society.” More disappointing than matters of rhetorical style is the absence of any critical discussion of race, class or gender. About a selection from Diane di Prima’s “Memoirs of a Beatnik,” O’Brien’s tone turns romantic: The memoir, he says, “describes a time when there was a genuine underground and an alternative consciousness, and evokes an epiphany of generational shift.” But nothing is mentioned of the fact that much of it was fictional, written to satisfy the demands of di Prima’s male editor that she add more sex. Norman Mailer’s dated and problematic essay “The White Negro” is included, about which O’Brien says: “Mailer was too ambitious to be hip and too hot to be cool — he was running for president of the Great American Novel — but he knew the buzz.”

If Joseph Campbell was right that “the only myth . . . worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet,” then Bernheimer’s anthology of re­imagined classical myths has some news: The immediate future is here. In her introduction, Bernheimer notes we’re in the “age of the Anthropocene,” in which human impact on the planet is so devastating it gets its own geological name. “With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we’ve managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. . . . We are the gods.” How then, in these omnipotent yet forsaken days, are we to find new myths? Bernheimer has invited 50 prominent writers to try. The result is an abundant and often impressive collection, addressing a wildly varied cast of characters who, like the doomed Orpheus, often confound us with their need to peer back over their shoulders. In Aurelie Sheehan’s “The Lotus Eaters,” the teenagers Artesia and Pete wander around not ancient Greece (as Artemis and Apollo did) but central Tucson, after dark, at a run-down out-of-­business miniature golf course. Several stories feature nonhuman characters: Aimee Bender’s ogres, Benjamin Percy’s wrestling-dummy, Sigrid Nunez’s beguiling witch, Ben Loory’s sun-obsessed squid. Odysseus’ dog also makes an appearance, in Joy Williams’s nearly perfect “Argos.” Other stories offer more realist fare, like Maile Meloy’s “Demeter” and Emma Straub and Peter Straub’s “Lost Lake,” both standouts that update and domesticate the myth of Persephone and Demeter into contemporary tales of divorce and child custody. And in Kelly Braffet and Owen King’s clever story “The Status of Myth,” the only Olympus to be found is a “Greek diner in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.” Bern­heimer’s previous anthology, “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,” sought to restore some glory to the sanitized and Disneyfied fairy tales many of us grew up on. In this anthology, Bernheimer has set her goal on restoring something even more precious.

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THE MOTHEdited by Catherine BurnsHyperion, paper, $15.99.

“The fact that something really happened is the defense of the mediocre novelist,” says Richard Price, making the case, one might guess, for literary craft, for those formal elements that are the DNA of story. To varying but satisfying degrees, those necessary narrative elements are present in each of the 50 true stories collected in this first-time anthology from the Moth. For over 15 years, the Moth has been presenting onstage true stories performed by the people who experienced them, delivered without notes in front of a live audience — a sort of sweet and earnest love child of “This American Life” and “Def Poetry Jam,” which now makes its way from stage to page. Price’s “Bicycle Safety on Essex,” not surprisingly one of the strongest in the bunch, has all the structural tightness, resonant dialogue and dramatic tension of any literary short story. And Janna Levin’s “Life on a Möbius Strip” elevates the form nearly to an art, blending metaphor and symmetry, language and symbol, humor and drama — dulce et utile. Adam Gopnik’s “LOL,” another standout, about a father and son who find connection over the Internet, makes one understand the power and popularity of the series. A few pieces would benefit from a denouement — both Joyce Maynard and Cynthia Riggs, for instance, offer pieces about mysterious pen pals. Maynard’s story even has a “reveal.” But a reveal isn’t the same as an ending. And a story that lacks one can seem like a body that lacks a limb. This doesn’t mean the stories aren’t affecting in their own right — Riggs’s “The Case of the Curious Codes” left me so moved, I made an overdue call to my elderly mother in Boston. And Damien Echols’s “Life After Death” placed me back in my chair, after I closed the story, devastated and broken. Perhaps it’s safe to say that a story’s truth doesn’t necessarily make it good, but all good stories seem, in their way, utterly true.

Joseph Salvatore is the author of the story collection “To Assume a Pleasing Shape.” He teaches writing and literature at the New School.